Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Also at Seillans was a homeopathic doctor from London, David Curtin. Elizabeth had contacted Curtin to oversee Bruce’s return to England. She was hoping to fly back with Bruce on Monday and put him in The Lighthouse, an AIDS hospice off Ladbroke Grove.

  They took turns to sit at his bed. Diana Melly fed him a morsel of salmon. “It sat on his tongue and he wouldn’t swallow.” Volans likened the atmosphere to “a circus”. At some point Prouvost-Keller arrived on his motorbike in his black leather bomber-jacket with “Do it to me, baby” patched to his sleeve. Shirley produced a crate of champagne and by Saturday evening everyone was slurring their words. Volans says: “Shirley, tanked up, would say: ‘Bruce, I know you want to die, but I’ve got to disappoint you because you’re not dying.’ And every time she said ‘dying’, he shrieked: he was petrified of dying.”

  “It was the most awful thing I’ve ever experienced,” says Wyndham. “It was like being in hell and he was in hell.”

  Bruce had been having recurrent nightmares. At night he had visions of a face, frightening him. Shirley wrote in her diary: “On Sunday a.m. I heard screams and went to B’s room at 6 a.m. before it was light. He was terrified of ‘the face’ that he saw in his dreams. Eliz slept in his bed, which comforted him . . .” Elizabeth says, “He would lie awake and didn’t want the light turned off It was a human face, like a personification of his pain.” She would shout at him: “He’s not here, Bruce! He’s not here!”

  Volans says: “She was trying to force him to hold on. She was doing everything she could to keep him alive.” To Volans, it was at this point that Bruce’s life most closely mirrored Rimbaud’s. “As Rimbaud was passing through his ‘saison en enfer’,” Bruce had written during his first journey to the desert, “he realised that the Beast was winning.”

  In The Viceroy of Ouidah, Father de Lessa also suffered Rimbaud’s dark dreams. “He kept seeing an animal called the Zoo. The Zoo had the head of a monkey, a dog’s body, leopard’s claws, and it would sprawl lecherously across his path and twitter like a bird . . . Dom Francisco decided to ship him back to Bahia. But the Zoo was also in the sea; for when they strapped him aboard the canoe, he was still screaming: ‘The Zoo! The Zoo!’”

  Bruce spent most of Sunday 15 January, his last day conscious, lying in sunshine on the terrace. “He had been very disappointed not to have won the Booker Prize,” says Shirley. “Teddy Millington-Drake telephoned from Italy and said Alberto Moravia had loved Utz and had written a full page rave review. I went straight and told Bruce and he gave a long slow smile and he just said: ‘Better than the Booker’.”

  That afternoon Shirley was alone with him on the terrace when the sun went in. “It grew cold very quickly. Somehow I humped him over the steps.” She carried Bruce inside, into the summer salon, and lay him on a chaise longue, kneeling beside him. “I said: ‘I love you, Bruce,’ and to my joy he clearly said with an effort: ‘I love you, too.’ They were his last words to me.”

  At 3 a.m. on the morning of Monday 16 January, Elizabeth came into Kevin’s room. She needed his help urgently. Bruce’s fingernails had turned blue. “He was in a coma. He was not responding and he never regained consciousness,” says Elizabeth.

  An ambulance was called. Diana Melly and Shirley Conran ran out in their nightgowns and helped a coiffed stretcher-bearer to support Bruce’s body over the steps. Elizabeth climbed in the ambulance beside him and it disappeared, jolting down the steep, cobbled hill.

  He was taken to the state hospital in Nice. “I was allowed to sit with him until the staff came, then told to leave,” says Elizabeth. She sat in the waiting room until mid-morning when the others arrived from Seillans. They filed in to see him. He was lying on a steel bed, peacefully asleep, his face attached to an oxygen tube. His skin had gone back to peach colour. “He looked suddenly so young,” says Volans.

  Elizabeth did not go back to the hospital that day. “We felt she had been being generous in sharing Bruce,” says Shirley. “When she didn’t want to stay with him, nor should we. She was very quiet, in her own space.” Shirley booked Elizabeth into the Acropolis Hotel, close by, while Wyndham, Volans and Diana Melly returned to London. Meanwhile, Hugh was telephoned and asked to fly out.

  Bruce was kept on oxygen throughout Monday and all through Tuesday night. Elizabeth had promised him he would not have his life prolonged artificially. On Tuesday morning, she cracked for the first time: “He’s already dead,” she told the hospital staff. “That isn’t Bruce. It’s a shell. They’re making it breathe.”

  On Tuesday afternoon shortly before five, Hugh Chatwin turned up at the hotel and then he and Shirley Conran went in to pay their last respects. “His eyes are closed. He is grey. He is quiet,” wrote Shirley in her diary. They returned with Elizabeth to Seillans.

  At 10.45 on Wednesday morning, 18 January, Shirley wrote: “Bernard has telephoned E. B is being taken off everything. There is no point. It is a matter of hours. He’s breathing on his own.” At 1.35 p.m. she telephoned the hospital.

  “Awful Swiss yodelling while on hold on hospital phone. Died 5 minutes before. That golden child of fortune, whose christening was attended by all the good fairies, has now felt the bad fairies come true. The darting dragonfly has been trampled. And the world is truly a sadder place because BC is no longer in it.”

  “As far as I was concerned,” says Elizabeth, “he had died two days before.”

  XLI

  The Chatwin Effect

  Heroic saga – a young man, bursting with vigour and often credited with superhuman audacity in childhood leaves home on a long journey. After a sequence of Walter Mitty-ish adventures in remote and fabulous lands, he faces the jaws of Death.

  —BC, notebooks

  ON 19 JANUARY, JAMES LEES-MILNE WROTE HIS FINAL ENTRY on his old neighbour and walking companion: “Bruce Chatwin is dead. Not surprising from all accounts. A grievous loss to literature, the papers say. For one so comparatively young and only recently acknowledged the obituaries are amazingly long and eulogistic. You would suppose Lord Byron had died.”

  When Bruce died many people felt a sense of loss out of all proportion to their expectation. “His energy, his enthusiasm, his passion was fructifying,” says Colin Thubron. “He was expansive; he opened horizons; you always felt with Bruce he was capable of coming back with the key to everything.”

  On a train to Zurich, Clem Wood picked up a copy of the Guardian and saw a photograph of Bruce. “I was delighted. I thought it was another review. When I realised that I was reading his obituary, I burst into tears.” The art historian Hugh Honour was in Venice. “We came down to breakfast and the whole of the middle section of the Corriere della Sera was taken up under a single banner headline: Chatwin è morto.” Jack Lang sent a telegram from Paris: “J’apprends avec tristesse la mort de Bruce Chatwin. Avec lui, c’est un esprit multiple qui nous quitte. Un homme dont les livres nous avaient appris mieux connaitre les hommes.”

  The condolence letters registered a note of collective disbelief. “I’ve minded so much about his death,” wrote Ivry Freyberg. “I just haven’t been able to realise it’s true.”

  Richard Bull was moved to describe his impact: “Despite the large number of people one meets as a doctor, it is only the very rare person who can be said to influence your life; and I feel Bruce was one of those people for me.” A friend from New York wrote: “He was a wild man, and somehow left everyone with two eyes in their head, working feet and a pen feeling that they had misspent their attention . . .” Peter Levi was inarticulate: “I can’t write this letter, I’m afraid.”

  On 27 January a class of students from a junior school in Leicester sent Elizabeth a package of letters and drawings. “My teacher Mrs Fawcett told us about Bruce Chatwin and told us he liked books,” wrote one of the girls. “I like books too and I hope your [sic] feeling well.” Sirish Patel told her: “We did a play in our school about the Aborigines and how the world began. It was very good. Your husband’s book made it happe
n.” Farren Sunley was one of the actors: “I held the map up and shouted ‘I am a member of the Koala clan’, I started at Shark Bay and ended at Sydney.”

  “He was one of the nicest men I ever met,” wrote Anne-Marie Mykyta from Adelaide. “It is not too much to say that I loved him. On the day I heard of his death, I lay on my bed and read Songlines again and wept.” Many of the letters were signed by unknown names. Elizabeth wrote back to one: “It comes as rather a shock to find that people think of him as a great man. I think he would have been surprised too.”

  On 20 January, Leo Lerman cabled her from New York: “The longest journey this one, and he always loved journeys.”

  “The stars know the time when we die,” Bruce had written in his notebook. Several saw an inevitability about his end. “Great people have an inbuilt instinct about how long they’re going to live,” said Pam Bell, “a sort of rhythm to the way they rule their life.” This explained the disciplined economy of his writing, his manic behaviour, his impatient appetite for experience. “He was like a little firework all the time,” says Barbara Bailey. “He never could stay long because he’d wear you away. That is why he died. You can’t be a beautiful firework and live on and on.” His dense, intense, short life had a preordained and mythic quality. It delighted him to lead everyone in his fantasies. By the end they had become a reality.

  He died young; but not so young as most people think. At 48, he had outlived many of his influences: Humphrey Chatwin, Robert Louis Stevenson, T. E. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, Robert Byron, Arthur Rimbaud. Had he lived, it is tempting to imagine Bruce as the polymathic André Malraux. He might have grown to resemble his description of Klaus Kinski playing the Viceroy of Ouidah: “a sexuagenarian adolescent all in white with a mane of yellow hair”. And behaved, perhaps, like Charles Milward the Sailor, home from the sea. “Charley the Pioneer with his restlessness gone, pottering round his garden, the Elms near Paignton.” Yet few of his friends could picture an elderly Chatwin. “I have great difficulty imagining him as an old man,” says Robert Hughes. “I think he would have been very crabby.”

  Dying early, his good looks for the most part intact in the public mind, Bruce stood for the promotable ideal of the literate adventurer. In Berlin, a travel bookshop, “Chatwins”, opened up in Goltzstrasse. In Amsterdam, an art gallery in Prinsengracht called itself “Songlines”, while in Paris a publishing house took the name “Utz”, publishing an edition of Walter Ralegh’s El Dorado in 1993. Patagonia, once a joke, has become the brand-name of an upmarket range of French wind and rainwear and a company in Italy now manufactures his moleskin notebooks, a Chatwin quotation in the back flap.

  He was emblematic of a way of thinking and of being. He was inquisitive, spiritual and global and the grass was always greener where he had travelled. He incited others to follow him. The Land Council in Alice Springs received requests from the French Foreign Legion for permits and maps “to walk the songlines”. He became an archetype for the urban traveller and a voice for Generation X. “You know Bruce said we should keep moving around,” sang the English pop group Everything But the Girl in their 1991 song “One Place”. He appealed to the world of youth, healthy-living, alternative life-styles; to both men and women. In Montreal, the Chatwin marriage was held up to an impatient girlfriend by a restless young traveller, Patrick Blake, teaching now in Korea, as “the perfect marriage”. To others, he represented the transforming potential of a chance encounter. A few weeks after his death, an advertisement appeared in the Village Voice, between a message to Doris to throw away her sandwich board and a thank-you to St Jude: “Bruce Chatwin aficionado now studying law, we talked for a block on 7th Street. Meet again?”

  One of Bruce’s inimitable legacies was “the campaign chair”. In July 1983, Clinton Tweedie, the art dealer from Brisbane, was in a queue in the Lix ice-cream parlour in the Piccadilly Arcade. Bruce, standing in front of him dressed in a lemon-coloured sweater, spun round. “You’re French, obviously.” “No, Australian.” Waiting for Tweedie when he came outside, Bruce invited himself to tea. Extraordinarily, Tweedie was staying in the Covent Garden flat belonging to Bruce’s old boy friend Donald Richards. Copies of Bruce’s books lay scattered about, although Tweedie had never heard of their author. That afternoon Bruce took Tweedie to the Essential Cubism exhibition at the Tate and then showed him his attic flat in Eaton Place. There Tweedie sat in a comfortable deck-chair with a sweat-stained leather seat. Bruce, who had unfolded it from nothing, explained how it was designed in London in 1856. He had acquired the chair from Mussolini’s daughter in Capri and the sweat was that of Il Duce himself, who had used the chair while directing his conquest of Ethiopia.

  Visiting London again some years later, after Bruce’s death, Tweedie recognised the chair when he walked into Lord Macalpine’s gallery in Cork Street. Remembering Bruce’s story, he bought it for £1,000, took it back to Australia and now manufactures copies from a factory in Djakarta with canvas seats designed by Mambo.

  The chair story is quintessential Chatwin: several bizarre coincidences, an arresting provenance, a stylish object. In her memoir With Chatwin, one of Bruce’s editors, Susannah Clapp, invoked an adjective to describe this phenomenon: “. . . at about the time the word ‘Thatcherite’ entered the English language, so did the term ‘Chatwinesque’.”

  Bruce’s popularity was reflected in posthumous sales of his books. Published the spring after his death, his collected journalism What Am I Doing Here sold 31,688 in hardback in the British market, more than any of his other books.

  The success encouraged Maschler in 1993 to publish an edition of Bruce’s photographs, with extracts from his notebooks edited by Francis Wyndham. Three years later, Cape published a further selection of essays and stories: Anatomy of Restlessness. In Italy, Adelphi sold more than 50,000 copies of both of those books. But in London and New York there grew concerns that Bruce in death was threatening to be more prolific than he was in life. His American editor, Elisabeth Sifton, who had worked with him line by line on On the Black Hill, articulated the difficulty of speaking about “the published Chatwin” in that, she felt, “some of it was not ready for publication”. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reckoned that Anatomy of Restlessness did nothing to enhance his reputation. “Sounding a lot like a flower child with a smattering of scholarly training, Chatwin is decidedly not at his best in this sort of theoretical writing.” There was, she hinted, the whiff of a fully scraped barrel.

  In What Am I Doing Here, Bruce wrote of how “Malraux’s breathless career has left lesser spirits far behind – and irritated.” Bruce, who was himself an exceptionally generous author when it came to discussing the works of others – “I have no memory of Bruce ever saying anything nasty about anyone,” says Rushdie – was perhaps inevitably the victim of jealousy. Wyndham, who had launched Bruce on his writing career, was among the first to worry about a backlash. He feared that Bruce’s premature death and the quality of his early books had inflated his reputation, created a cult. “He is right to worry,” wrote John Ryle in the Independent on Sunday on 24 October 1993. Ryle referred to a memoir by Paul Theroux in Granta 44.

  Theroux insisted he had written his memoir as a friend. (“He was an inspiration to me,” Theroux had written to Elizabeth.) The article was described by Graham Coster in the London Review of Books on 8 February 1996 as “an assassination” – a “fierce appreciation of a bore, an incessant chatterer, an embellisher of fact, a callow enthusiast for pretentious sentences and bogus science, and someone who whinged with unattractive self-absorption about the difficulty of writing anything, when no one was asking him to anyway”.

  Casually approaching a subject that neither Bruce nor Elizabeth took casually (“we had met his wife, but the fact of Bruce having a wife was so improbable that no one quite believed it”), Theroux recorded Bruce’s “lively belief in homosexuality”. He found “rather disturbing” Bruce’s decision never to speak about his private life – although, as Ryle pointed
out, it was questionable whether the fact that Theroux had chosen to write about his own sex life had any bearing on Chatwin’s right not to talk about his.

  A sense that he had lied about his illness hatched the suspicion that he might have lied in his art. Under the headline “Chatwin accused of hit and myth” the Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough column reported the exaggerations which John Pilkington claimed to have uncovered in In Patagonia: “To be blunt, much of this book was invented.” Bruce in death was starting to resemble, in some minds, In Patagonia’s mythomaniac hero Louis de Rougemont, compère of the show “The Greatest Liar on Earth” for whom “dream and reality had fused into one”. A critical perception in England, that Bruce was engaged in a similar hoax, was not one that would find fertile ground on the Continent where there is much less obsession with category. “If one had to object to people making things up, we’d kill literature,” says his Italian publisher and author, Roberto Calasso. Nor was this attitude encountered in America. “Americans by force of their history and landscape do not think like that,” says Elisabeth Sifton. In Sifton’s view Bruce actually made up very little. He had the imagination to tell stories, to connect them, to enlarge, colour and improve them, but not to invent. “He was an artist, not a liar.”

  David Plante, who wrote a portrait of him for Esquire in 1990, attributed the backlash to an English desire to knock Bruce down a peg. “There might have been something devilish about Bruce – that he wanted people to envy him. But he was a magical person and he was enviable and if you envy someone you want to see them destroyed.”